whosoever has let a minotaur enter them or a sonnet—

"Carr unfurls a world shot through with the embodied spiritual, a universe numinous and immanent, replete with permeated mediation. The gods here float, as they did for Pound, in the azure air."

~ Craig Dworkin

"Writing through slivered landscapes, this is verbal art delighting in its impossibility and showing us that those moments where connectives fail, we are tethered by something else."

~ Sandra Doller

"Emily Carr explodes our understanding of ourselves and what we might be doing here on this planet. The poet offers a new mythology for the world we go about acting as if we know. I need this book, and right now we all could use what this book freely gives us."

~ Dara Wier

"A raw energy rips through these poems in language that refuses to land. Carr works her fabulous phrasing against a backdrop of the natural world caught on its own terms. The whol coalesces into vivid presence with everything at stake and the verve to address it."

McSWEENEY’S: What is the crisis—or one of them—at the heart of your Minotaur poems?

EMILY CARR: Minotaur is an answer in need of a question. If there is a crisis at the heart of these poems, it’s just that: I’m falling out of love, & I don’t know it yet. In a recent “On Being” interview with Krista Tippett, David Whyte puts it far more eloquently: in these poems, I am overhearing myself saying things I didn’t want to know about the world, or about myself.

Minotaur was originally the third section of my dissertation, which means I composed it around 2008 or 2009. I ran away from my husband in 2010. In December 2013, I got divorced. In January 2014, McSweeney’s accepted the manuscript for publication & in early 2015, I believe, we worked together to finalize the collection for publication. It wasn’t until that moment that I started thinking about these poems in relation to my divorce, & falling out of love. So elegy, too, is a crisis at the heart of these poems; again, to borrow from Whyte, it’s a conversation between grief & celebration, between the past & the future, between what we know & what we can’t ever know (still) (again). It’s the shock of becoming the kind of person who…